Equipment
Buying a grinder at every budget
What you actually get as you spend more, where the meaningful steps are, and where the price curve stops buying anything you can taste.
Diego Ferrant
27 articles by Ferrant
Water & Grind
Common myths, corrected
A collection of persistent claims about coffee and tea that are wrong, partly wrong, or more complicated than stated.
Beans & Origin
Coffee in cooking
Coffee is a bitter, aromatic, acidic ingredient, and it behaves like one, which is not always how recipes treat it.
Equipment
Setting up a small home coffee bar
Layout, workflow and the practical details that make a daily routine pleasant rather than cluttered.
Water & Grind
Sensory training: learning to taste
Tasting is a learnable skill, and most of it is about attention and vocabulary rather than about having a special palate.
Roasting
What roasters actually do all day
Sourcing, sample roasting, production, quality control and a great deal of logistics, of which the actual roasting is a small part.
Brewing Methods
Milk drinks: what actually distinguishes them
Cappuccino, latte, flat white and cortado are not arbitrary names, though the boundaries have blurred considerably.
Equipment
Choosing an espresso machine
The categories, what genuinely differs between them, and how to decide whether you need one at all.
Roasting
Roast defects and how to taste them
Learning to identify what went wrong in the roast tells you whether a disappointing cup is your brewing or the coffee.
Roasting
Roasting for espresso versus filter
The same green coffee needs different treatment depending on how it will be brewed, and the reasons are physical.
Beans & Origin
Robusta, reconsidered
A species dismissed by specialty coffee for decades, with a case for reconsideration that is partly about quality and partly about climate.
Equipment
Cleaning and maintaining your equipment
Rancid oils and scale account for a surprising number of complaints about coffee that has nothing wrong with it.
Water & Grind
Temperature: why it matters and how to control it
The extraction lever most people never touch, largely because the average kettle boils and stops and offers no other option.
Roasting
Roast profiles and what a curve means
Roasters talk about profiles and rate of rise, which sounds technical and describes something fairly intuitive.
Brewing Methods
Turkish coffee and other traditions
Brewing methods that predate every piece of equipment discussed elsewhere on this site, and are still the everyday method for millions.
Equipment
Milk: steaming, frothing and the alternatives
Texture is a physical process you can learn, and plant milks behave differently for reasons worth understanding.
Equipment
Scales, kettles and the rest of the kit
What is genuinely useful, what is nice to have, and what is decoration dressed up as necessity by the people selling it.
Roasting
Decaffeination: how it is done and what it costs the cup
Four main processes, meaningfully different results, and decaf has improved enormously from its reputation.
Roasting
Cupping: how professionals taste coffee
A standardised method for comparing coffees, which you can do at home with a spoon and some bowls.
Equipment
Cups, mugs and why the vessel changes the drink
Shape, material and thickness all affect temperature and aroma delivery, which is a smaller effect than the marketing claims and larger than nothing.
Roasting
Home roasting: is it worth it?
Entirely achievable, considerably cheaper per kilogram, and a genuine amount of work with a long learning curve.
Beans & Origin
Single origin and blends: a false argument
One is not better than the other. They are different products with different purposes, and the marketing has confused this thoroughly.
Brewing Methods
Moka pot: the method everyone gets wrong
A stovetop pressure brewer that produces something excellent when treated correctly, and something acrid when not.
Brewing Methods
Espresso at home: what actually matters
The most demanding brewing method, where small errors are magnified and the grinder matters more than the machine.
Equipment
Choosing a grinder
The single piece of equipment that changes the cup most, and the one people buy last.
Roasting
Light, medium and dark: what you are actually choosing
The most visible variable on a coffee bag, described with terms that mean different things at different roasters.
Roasting
What roasting actually does
Ten to fifteen minutes of controlled heat that turns a hard green seed into something worth drinking.